‘Exhibiting my own work’

With her giant dark red mohican and permanent cigarette, artist Angie Taylor’s avatar does not look like a typical land mogul. But she is one of a growing breed of people staking a claim to new virtual worlds.

“I bought my first metaverse parcel in July 2020 and paid about £1,500. I bought it for exhibiting my own work, but also for running metaverse events that would promote my art and also other people’s art,” she says.

Angie, from Brighton, built two galleries full of strange and beautiful digital artwork, which is being sold in cryptocurrency, on her land in the Voxels world.

Angie’s plots are about the size of a small family house (if you compare them to the size of her avatar). The tallest stretches up over three floors and has a roof terrace with a white-and-black-striped road crossing, and a pink taxi permanently driving back and forth just for fun.

But you get a real sense of the scale of this world from the air.

“Hold down the F key and you can fly up to take a look at my neighbourhood,” Angie explains. Above her gallery you can see thousands of identical boxes of land stretching to the horizon.

Voxels is one of dozens of virtual worlds that describe themselves as metaverses. It is confusing, because people often talk about “the metaverse” as if there was only one. But until one platform starts to dominate, or these disparate worlds join together, companies are selling land and experiences in their own versions.

source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63488059